International B2B Campaign

National PR Agency B2B Case Study

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At HQ SEO, we have worked with a number of clients, but this particular case – a brand new website for a national PR and marketing agency (UK) – was unique in many ways.

Overview Of The Client

Whenever we take on a new client for any of our service – from digital PR to overall SEO – our main aim is to first set the record straight for their website in terms of technical SEO. Since this was a brand-new website and the designers had done a fairly basic job of putting it live, we had a mixed bag of pros and cons.

The good thing was that we had a clean slate to work with. This allowed us to build the entire campaign ground-up without worrying about any baggage of the past.

On the somewhat negative side, there were the usual suspects.

Most web developers and designers – especially smaller agencies – are so much focussed on functionality and appearance (they all want the site to look great when it’s live) that factors like site speed, crawlability and indexation are inevitably pushed to the backseat. So, in this particular case, we had to fix them all before we could think of implementing any advanced link building, digital PR or overall SEO strategies.

The best thing about this case study is the fact that it gives a 100% fair and true representation of what we do as a leading SEO agency in the UK.

Overview Of The Project

Client

A National PR & Marketing Company, Looking To Expand Internationally

Mission

To improve overall SEO, boost organic traffic, create a profitable, ROI-heavy lead gen vehicle for the business through organic marketing

Start Date

June 1st, 2017

End Date

Ongoing. Please read on for more.

Returns

Over 25x ROIover the first 18 months. Over 15x increase in qualified leads per month, within just 9 months (each qualified lead being worth over £1,000 to the client).

Where We Started

As mentioned earlier, we had the advantage of starting off with a clean slate. Here’s a quick review of the organic traffic for the client before we took over:

Over the period May 01, 2017 to May 31, 2017, the organic traffic was really poor – pretty much non-existent for all practical purposes. This obviously meant that the client couldn’t generate any leads and had to rely on offline marketing (which is expensive and can only go so far).

On June 01, 2017 we took over. Let’s follow the progress with milestones set at every 6 months.

December, 2017 – Update (6 Months On)

For every project we undertake and every client we get on board, our aim is to go above and beyond the contractual requirements. To that end, the first six months are extremely crucial – this is the period in which we streamline the website for a perfect take-off down the line.

It usually takes us about 2-4 weeks to iron out all the technical SEO faults (read more about our technical SEO services here). As you can see, there was hardly any uptick during this period (June-July, 2017).

Once we’re through with this stage, the results start coming in. Here’s a December, 2017 update (the first 6-month milestone, on November 30, 2017).

As you can see, we were able to set the website up for substantial traffic successfully. Within 6-months, we managed to establish a firm, positive and upwards organic traffic trend.

For this client, the 1-year mark was really special. Here’s how our services fared, starting from June 01, 2017 to May, 31, 2018.

The numbers paint a clear picture of the growth we helped happen over the 1-year period.

From less than 20 users per month, we were able to launch the organic traffic into overdrive – at over 2,500 new users per month. That, right there, is a 150x increase in organic traffic, within 1 year.

During this period, the client estimated that they received 30+ organic leads on average, per month. This was the much-needed boost for them to amp up their other marketing campaigns that revolve around SEO – link building, content marketing and social media marketing.

December, 2018 – Update (18 Months On)

For the client of this size, we estimated that 18-20 months would be enough to reach the peak performance for the primary stages of digital marketing. It turned out to be a good estimate because, come November 30, 2018, we hit our target of 5,000+ new users per month (shown in the image below).

For the kind of industry this client operates in, 5,000 active users per month is a phenomenal number. This, on average, resulted in over 80+ qualified leads per month. Each lead, according to the client’s estimate, was worth over £1,000.

Putting Our Performance In The Right Perspective

At the 18-month mark, we had not only outperformed the client’s expectations, but also been able to hand them over a website that – with regular content marketing – could keep bringing in more leads each week for them. Having such a SEO-streamlined asset at your disposal gives you a significant edge over your competitors.

Here’s an example. Our SEO efforts helped the client’s website rank #1 in Google for nearly 100 top industry keywords, by the end of November, 2018 (the ‘money keywords’ that pull in leads and revenue, over and over again).

The website also ranks #1-10 for hundreds of important keywords. Ahref’s generic organic traffic value calculator estimates the ‘traffic only’ value of the website at over $10,000 per month – up 100x from where we started in June, 2017.

Overview Of Our Integrated Link Building Campaigns

Integrating link building campaigns within the overall SEO project is a tactic that we have developed fully in-house. Our link building experts work in tandem with our SEO and content teams to find, claim and maximise favourable link building opportunities.

Within just 18 months, we managed to build nearly 27,000 links to this website – a massive feat. This immensely helped in improving the domain authority from 0 in June, 2017 to 34 in December, 2018. As a result, more organic traffic followed and kicked off a nice, cyclic effect that allowed us to rank the website for nearly 6,000 keywords – each of which continues to contribute towards the final ROI.